Witness to the German Revolution (34 page)

The frequent looting of bakeries seems to me to demonstrate the vigor of the hungry rather than their brutality. I've been told of cases of orderly, calm, “decent” looting, during which, taking only what was necessary, the poor didn't dream of touching money or expensive articles! It's among other elements of the population that we can see a new outbreak of brutal and indeed depraved behavior. In one year, the Berlin police know of 2,000 cases of children who have been ill treated. In France, the mainstream press have reported details of the anti-Semitic pogroms in Berlin. We know less about what the Bavarian fascists are capable of; during the wretched coup of Hitler and Ludendorff on November 7, they wrecked every item of furniture belonging to the social democrat Auer and terrorized his family for hours on end. I've just read that in the surroundings of Chemnitz, uniformed Nazis thrashed Communist workers who had been arrested till the blood ran… Twice, in recent days, at Altenhausen, near Coburg, and at Munich, they set up sham court-martials, in one case to condemn Jews to be hanged, and in the other case to tell SPD and Communist municipal councillors they would be shot…

Civilized behavior has, in short, been rapidly disintegrated by generalized poverty; the reactionaries, in a conscious effort to take the nation backwards, have added to the demoralization of the masses with elements of brutality, cruelty, obscurantism and sadism.

European culture is a whole and you can't remove any part of it without impoverishing thereby all the peoples and all the minds of Europe. Can we imagine French thought today without Kant, Nietzsche, Wagner, Haeckel, Marx, Einstein? There is no sphere of European intellectual life where German intelligence has not contributed its achievements: Avenarius, Mach,
²⁰¹
Ostwald, Helmholtz, Einstein in physics; Wundt and Freud in psychology; Max Müller, Max Weber, Cunow, Sombart, Eduard Fuchs
²⁰²
in sociology; Bebel, Hilferding, Franz Mehring, Rosa Luxemburg in socialism; Hauptmann, Wedekind, Dehmel, Stefan George, Stefan Zweig in literature; Richard Strauss and Mahler in music; Böcklin, Sleevogt, Liebermann, Corinth, Max Klinger in painting…
²⁰³
Here are European names, contemporary but already classic, which no “good European” can now ignore. I could mention many more, but I'm not making a catalog of great men. I haven't mentioned any of the representatives of the young Germany of today, because, incarcerated in their “defeated” country, they belong only to the Europe of tomorrow.

…In the country of these laborers of civilization it is no longer possible to print new books; no longer possible to publish sheet music; it is no longer possible to maintain the old laboratories or to buy or make precision instruments. Museums are no longer heated
in winter; many are closed; in any case it is impossible to add to their stock.—Dr. Georg Schreiber, from Münster, has just published a short book on the
Poverty of Science and Brain Workers in Germany.
I've taken the following data from him:

Institutes of scientific research that for years have been pursuing studies of specialized problems, such as the Institute of Epidemiology and the Institute for the Study of Cancer (Berlin), the Institute for the Study of Tropical Diseases (Hamburg), the Institute of Occupational Medicine and Hygiene (Frankfurt-am-Main), are having to reduce their expenses to a ridiculous minimum—or close down altogether. Taken all together, the scientific libraries of Prussia had, in 1922, a budget of 17 million marks (the exchange rate of the dollar was 4,000), while a single Scandinavian University, Upsala, had 135 million marks for the year. The Berlin Public Library, which before the war received copies of 2,300 foreign journals, now gets no more than 200. The gaps made in its collections by the blockade have not been filled. German scientific journals, like all the others, are disappearing. The Museum of Printing in Leipzig, in a desperate situation, has decided to sell abroad a valuable Gutenberg
²⁰⁴
Bible; only spontaneous donations from German artists enabled it to avoid resorting to this extreme measure.

What is happening to intellectuals amid this collapse of culture? Some, who are worse paid than workers, become workers. The majority vegetate, embittered. A composer said the following to me, which I quote more or less word for word:

“In a few years, nothing but the memory of the rich musical ave to write scores for operettas in order not to die of hunger…

On the revolving stage of the great theater built by Reinhardt,
²⁰⁵
a boxing ring has been set up. The
Volksbühne,
the people's theater, in Berlin, is on the road to bankruptcy…

If Pasteur were working in Germany today, he would not be able to do anything for humanity. If Wagner were alive, he would have to write scores for operettas in order not to die of hunger…

So that
Herr Raffke
,
²⁰⁶
newly rich and one of those who has profited from the collapse of German culture, should have music with his supper…

Stinnesierung: “Stinnesation.” The term is in current use. It is derived from the name of Herr Hugo Stinnes, a plutocrat, richer than Vanderbilt and Carnegie, who owns five or six world shipping lines, a large number of mines, factories and banks, who is one of the kings of coal, one of the kings of electricity, one of the kings of gold in Europe, who is considering putting at the head of a dictatorial government of the German Republic the general manager of his companies, Herr Minoux. Now he wants to make a monopoly of intelligence as well. His press trust, whose influence extends to a good fifty daily papers, uses in various capacities all those well-known intellectuals who don't want to resign themselves to poverty; and he is using them to implant in Germany a fascist ideology that is much more coherent, more elaborated, than that of a Hitler or even of a Mussolini. In the course of the last few months the scholars and journalists on Herr Hugo Stinnes' payroll have published
hundreds of articles, demonstrating the historical necessity of a reactionary dictatorship and (to quote the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
word for word) that “the belief in the advantages of the eight-hour day is based on crude scientific errors.” The press trust, a powerful enterprise devoted to winning over public opinion in favor of the owners of heavy industry, is not the only element or even the most important one in the “Stinnesation” of intellectual life. In the universities, in the management of large factories, in intellectual circles closely connected to industrial circles, the reactionary thought of present-day Germany is being elaborated, the philosophy of action of a possessing class, determined to make a final effort to survive the national and cultural catastrophe of Germany—that is, to survive its own crime.

Thus German capitalism, which first reached full maturity, then a decline hastened by military defeat, has become, after having been a factor of national organization, a factor of national disintegration, and it is fulfilling a comparable function in relation to European culture which it first developed—directly by means of the development of industrial technology—and which it is now murdering…

In the battle that has been joined between the upper German bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat, between a class which is the cause of the current bankruptcy of culture and a class which, as is proved by the amazing cultural renaissance of Russia, is capable of giving a new impulse to culture, what could be the consequences of even a very temporary victory of the former?

The decadence of which we are witnesses is already the fruit of a temporary victory of counterrevolution. Joy, as I have said, is dead in this Germany of mourning and poverty: its best sons are dead too. Fifteen thousand proletarians—it is the accepted figure—died
defeated in the social battles of 1918-19. Fifteen thousand members of an elite, the builders and soldiers of a new order, who had reached a sufficiently high level of class consciousness to try to move, at the cost of their lives, from verbal socialism to socialism in practice. What was their cultural value in a country already impoverished by war? Did they not represent one of its last reserves of civilizing energy? Moreover, the intellectual elite has been struck
in the head
by the counterrevolution. Liebknecht was not just a popular orator but above all a scholar; Rosa Luxemburg was one of the richest and most powerful Marxist minds of our time. Gustav Landauer, whose skull was crushed with hobnailed boots
²⁰⁷
(in Munich, in 1919, after the fall of the soviets), was an artist and a philosopher, one of those anarchists who belonged to the dying lineage of the likes of Reclus and Kropotkin.
²⁰⁸
They have also killed the socialist idealist, Kurt Eisner,
²⁰⁹
Ernst Toller is still in prison, Erich Mühsam, a poet and thinker, is also still in prison, but he, by a singular injustice, is almost forgotten…

What could a new victory of counterrevolution mean to Germany ? Some reign of white terror, Horthy-style,
²¹⁰
with an endless stream of murders, internments, fraudulent trials, executions and pogroms… Think of von Kahr's Munich, from where they are driving out the Jews, as they did in the thirteenth century. A complete “Stinnesation” of any surviving intellectual life. The ten-hour day,
arms production, the triumph of the desire for military revenge, perhaps a restoration of the monarchy, certainly, in a few years, war. A perfected form of war, aerial, chemical, bacteriological…

Let us even admit, although it scarcely looks probable, the possibility of a new stabilization of democracy and the return of an economic conjuncture in Germany which is favorable to the bourgeois order. We've already been through it. It would merely be a continuation of decadence: and however long it might last, no other great hope than that of revolution could grow up in the population. By defending its class interests, by preparing to take power, the German proletariat today, in its sector of the front, is defending European culture.

Clarté
, February 1 & 15, 1924

In September, October and November in Germany, we have just lived through a profound revolutionary experience, which is still little known and often little understood in other countries. We have been at the very heart of a revolution. The armed vigil has been a long one, but zero hour never came… A drama that was almost silent, almost unbelievable. A million revolutionaries, ready, waiting for the signal to go on to the attack; behind them millions of unemployed, hungry, battered, desperate people, a whole suffering population, murmuring: “We too, we too!” The muscles of this crowd were already taut, their fists already gripping the Mausers they were going to use against the armored cars of the Reichswehr… And nothing happened, except the bloody clowning in Dresden, a corporal followed by four armed ruffians driving from their offices the workers' ministers who had made bourgeois Germany tremble, a few pools of blood—sixty dead in all—on the
streets of the industrial cities of Saxony; the jubilation of a bankrupt social democracy, which emerged from the massive but passive adventure dully faithful to its old betrayals. None of those who lived through all the expectations of this fifty-day armed vigil knows all the details, everything that went on behind the scenes: for two whole classes were measuring their strength against each other, embodied in their vanguards, masked, in the shadows that are necessary for conspiracy. Of what everyone knows, not everything can be said; for revolutionary preparation is continuing under a military dictatorship. In this letter I should simply like to give you some impressions, some detailed observations, and suggest a few conclusions to you…

It was around September 15 that we felt the harsh approach of decisive events. The Great Coalition, including the party of Stinnes and Stresemann as well as the SPD, had taken power on August 12, as a result of the general strike. The blood of seventy workers killed in the strike sealed the pact of collaboration made between Stresemann, former agent of the Saxon industrialists, a monarchist in 1918, and Rudolf Hilferding, formerly a left wing Independent Social Democrat, Marxist author of
Finance Capital.
Contrary to what was later believed in the International,
²¹¹
the remarkable August general strike which drove Herr Cuno from power had been only a substantial success for the working class, but not a brilliant victory. The railway workers had scarcely taken part; in Berlin, traffic in the streets and commercial life were scarcely disrupted. Already social democratic passivity obstructed from the outset a powerful spontaneous mass
movement. The hasty vote by the Reichstag, on August 10, right in the middle of the strike, for taxes on property, and the pathetic collapse of Herr Cuno bore witness to the anxiety of the bourgeoisie, faced for the first time with the consequences of its looting of the nation, rather than to the vigor of the workers' offensive, led by a strong minority, but sabotaged by a powerful majority. At this moment, the most perceptive minds in the enemy classes were led into error. The intelligent bourgeois, impressed by the ample spontaneity of the movement, exaggerated the immediate force of the revolutionary wave; they were afraid. Meanwhile, the revolutionary workers were fired with enthusiasm for the popularity of the KPD (to which, in various places, the strikers deliberately offered the leadership of the movement), then for the political success achieved, and thus began to overestimate their own strength and to underestimate the “formidable powerlessness” of the social democracy.